nothing less than Wellington or Napoleon himself could
have awakened a spark of interest in us by this time. Then, too, the
vivid present blinded us to the past. The air was sweet with summer
scents. Mowers were busy in the hayfields. A swarm of little barefooted
beggars importuned us, turning dizzy somersaults until we could see only
a maze of flying, dusty feet on either side. One troop, satisfied or
despairing, gave way to another, and the guides were almost as annoying
as the beggars. They walk for miles out of their villages to forestall
each other, and meet the carriages that are sure to come from Brussels
on pleasant days. They drive sharp bargains. As you near the centre of
interest, competition is greater, and their demands proportionately
less. We refused the extortionate overtures of two or three, and finally
picked up a shrewd-faced young fellow in a blue blouse, who hung upon
the step of the carriage, or ran beside it for the last mile or two of
the distance. The village of Mont St. Jean follows that of Waterloo. It
is only a scant collection of whitewashed farm buildings of brick. We
rolled through it without stopping, and out again between the quiet,
smiling fields, our minds utterly refusing to grasp the idea that they
had swarmed once with an army; that in this little village we had just
left--dull, half asleep in the sunshine--dreadful slaughter had held
high carnival one July day, not many years before. Even when the guide,
clinging to the door of the carriage, rattled over the story of the
struggle in a _patois_ all his own, hardly a shadow of the scene was
presented to us.

As our horses slackened their pace, he stepped down from his perch to
gather a nosegay of the flowers by the road-side, making no pause in his
mechanical narrative--of how the Anglo-Belgian army were gathered upon
this road and the fields back to the wood, on the last day of the fight;
how many of the officers had been called at a moment's notice from the
gayeties at Brussels, and more than one was found dead upon the field
the next day, under the soaking rain, dressed as for a ball. He pushed
back his visorless cap, uttering an exclamation over the heat, and
adding, in the same breath, that just here, about Mont St. Jean, the
battle waged fiercely in the afternoon, when Ney, with his brave
cuirassiers, tried in vain to carry the position; and all the time, the
summer sounds of twittering birds and hum of locusts were in our ears